Today’s guest post comes from Renee Boomgaarden.
We recently made a grocery run to Bismarck. I started singing “The Wells Fargo Wagon” as I usually do whenever we buy provisions like that, and husband asked two interesting questions. Why was Wells-Fargo hauling freight to Mason City, Iowa, when everything came by train in those days? Were there stage coaches in northern Iowa at that time? Those questions puzzled me and I had no good answer until 2:00 the next morning when it came to me. Trains hauled everything to the towns, and Well-Fargo hauled things in the towns. It was a dray service.
My maternal great grandfather was a drayman. He had a business in Hamburg, Germany hauling freight on the Hamburg wharves and delivering things all over the city, just like the Wells-Fargo wagon. I wish I could have seen those wharves at the turn of the century when my great grandfather worked there. Hamburg was, and is, a very important world port, and it must have been a wild and exciting place to work. He did pretty well, I gather, since my grandmother told me that they had their own carriage with horses that had shiny, polished hooves. 
Her parents would leave gold-edged calling cards embossed with her father’s name when they went visiting. I still have one.
We had a strange carving in our house that my great grandfather was said to have been given by an Italian sea captain. I have it in my house now. It has always been an object of fascination for me, and you can see the weird animals and fantastical landscapes carved in it. It weighs 4 lbs. It is multicolored, with streaks of black, pale green, white, and scarlet. There are ravens, a bat, a stag, and what I think may be a bear, along with a bowl-shaped recess carved in the middle.
My mother didn’t know what sort of stone it was made from. I took it to a chemistry class in high school and the teacher helped me with a variety of chemical tests that ruled out granite, quartz, and marble. In 1995 I was in San Francisco, walking through China Town, and I saw similar carvings out of identical stone, and was told they were jade incense burners.
In 1913 my great grandfather left Hamburg, slipped into Holland, and boarded a ship in Rotterdam that sailed to New York City. He loved to gamble and lost everything playing cards. He ran away to avoid his creditors. My grandmother, age 14, her sister, age 12, and their mother followed in April of 1914. They brought the carving with them. Why? It is heavy. It must have taken up precious space in their luggage that they could have packed with more useful things. Not only did they haul it to New York City, they hauled it to Foley, MN two years later, and then to Pipestone County a few years after that. I wonder what it meant to them. It is more weird than beautiful. It is hard to dust. Why have I hauled it from Rock County to Winnipeg to Indiana to North Dakota? I have no idea.
My great grandfather died alone in an apartment in Pipestone in 1947. He lived with my grandmother for a few years after his wife died in 1937, and my grandmother eventually kicked him out of her house because he still played cards for money. I guess she never forgave him for what he lost in Germany. I don’t know what my children will do with the carving when I am gone, but I hope one of them will keep it and ponder its mystery and keep hauling it around.
What object are you hauling around as a relic of past generations?
Trail Baboon 
Nice tale, well told, indeed.
I carry no remnants. My sister has them all.
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
Oh, Renee, your sculpture is fabulous! The beauty of this is one reason to keep it, not to mention the family history it represents! While such artifacts do not ever change anything in OUR day-to-day lives or represent anything we have done in the present, they do honor those that came before us. We have so much richness in our lives because of what ordinary citizens did in the past to create the present. I always think those old-timers deserve respectful nods because of this.
I am a woman of many family-based remnants and artifacts of the history of the family and our nation. Only recently have I had the perspective to appreciate what they represent: the wanderlust, the hardship, motivations, and drive of my ancestors to somehow find a life different or better than what they had in Europe. My favorite family artifact is the 1807 wagon box which serves as a coffee table in the family room. This was part of a covered wagon. I have shown a picture of this in the past which must be in the TB archives somewhere. I touch the old thing, which now holds Christmas decorations, and imagine the bumpy trails, the yoked oxen which pulled the wagon, the long skirts, the campfires. All of it. I could not be in my life today if all that had not come before.
Your beautiful sculpture represents this, too. Wow. What an adventure life can be!
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My working hypothesis is that it is from China, but I really don’t know for sure. I haven’t ever seen anything like it when i have googled Chinese Incense burners.
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Good morning. Very well done, Renee. We have various items that came from past generations. I think the most unusual is a large ornate wooden pedestal. This was inherited from my mother-in-law. We don’t know how she obtained this item. It could have come from her family, although it was in her possession before she received the other things that were handed down to her. This pedestal has a big base and a big top connected by a post made up of two completely disconnect spirals of wood closely wound around each other. It sort of fits in with our somewhat craftsman styled furniture, but I think it would fit in better with more highly decorative furniture.
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I imagine it as something you could use to display a Christmas cactus.
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Or a fern. Ferns are great on plant stands.
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We found a candle holder and a candle to put on the pedestal. It sits in a place that that wouldn’t work well for a plant because there isn’t light in that location. However, a plant, such as a Christmas cactus, could sit on it during the holiday season.
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My parents had one like that that was, indeed, the stand for our Christmas cactus (a baby of which I have in my kitchen window, doing its late blooming thing).
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Great story! I’ve muttered on the Trail before about the “ancestral crap”, mostly unremarkable glassware and china. So far I’ve only moved it twice, but I had to pay storage for a couple of years until the landlords made some room in their garage. The one big piece of furniture is a bowfront china closet, which is a pain to find a safe space for but which I’ll probably keep the rest of my life, unless I move into a Tumbleweed tiny house or something. My goal at the moment is to fill it with tiki mugs and listen to the rattle of ancestors spinning in their graves.
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TeeHee.
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We probably will not do anything to my mother-in-laws pedestal that will cause her to spin in her grave. It is a very unusual item and It is somewhat fitting that it came from my mother-in-law who was stood out as a person who tended to draw attention to herself in unusual ways. We treasure her memory and also remember putting up with her tricks for getting attention.
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I have no idea what the style of furniture was in Hamburg at the turn of the century, and I regret not asking my grandmother what kind of furniture they had. I also regret not asking what happened to all their things. Were they seized by creditors? Did they sell them? what did they leave that she regretted parting with? She lived to be 99 and I wished I would have had my wits about me to ask more questions.
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Oh the missed opportunities!
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on the other hand, she may have taken the tack of my elders, and giving you only frustratingly vague answers. I got the feeling that they preferred not to even think about the past.
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Oh, Omie loved to dish the dirt. She would have told me if I had asked.
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I have my grandmother’s Fostoria (American pattern) glassware, including a lovely domed butter dish. It gets trotted out at least once a year and reminds me of Easter dinners at my grandmother’s house. There are a few other small things around, too. The big one, though, is still at my mom’s house: the parlor grand piano that belonged to my dad’s family. My paternal grandfather had worked for an architecture firm – if memory serves he had been their accountant. He made a tidy salary, built a largish house near Minnehaha Creek (just a few blocks north and west of where I live now), and somewhere in there my grandmother (who was the sort of lady who had gone to finishing school and played canasta with the other Ladies Who Lunched) purchased a parlor grand. It’s a beautiful instrument, lovely dark wood and good tone. It has been moved from that house by the creek (Grandpa was booted from the firm in a not-very-nice fashion right about the time of the Depression), to a smaller house closer to Nicollet Ave, then to a duplex, and I think a second duplex and finally to the house on Colfax where it has been since the late 50s. When my mother moves to someplace smaller, we are all unsure what to do with the piano: it’s too big for my small living room (being slightly larger than a baby grand, it would take up about a third of the room), but may not work at my brother’s house either. My big brother and I have joked about figuring out a pulley system so I could hang it from my ceiling and lower it as needed…I’m lobbying for it to go to his house where it might not be used as much, but at least there is room for it. I guess we’ll see what happens when we actually have to make the decision.
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The thing I notice is the practicality of the calling card. If his wife had died and he remarried, he could have kept using the same cards without needing a new engraving plate.
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🙂
When I saw “und Frau” I was reminded of the 1961 edition of the cookbook from my grandmother’s church with the picture of the Ladies’ Aide Society in it. Every single one of those women were listed as Mrs. His Name.
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Yes, my mom’s friends still address Christmas cards to each other this way…
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Nice story, Renee.
In my family I think the only heavy objects being hauled around are guilty memories. Some of us carry old misdeeds and ancient regrets as if they were something precious that we could never abandon
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Excellent story, Renee!
Like Jacque, I am a keeper of things that belonged to the ancestors. As I take mental inventory, I cannot think of a single item that came from Germany. Plenty of things written in German, but all published in th US.
Family lore has it as a certainty that one ancestress landed in New York with not a cent, knowing no one. I suspect that may be true in several cases.
on a smaller scale, I’ve done similar things, which is perhaps why I treasure those bits and pieces of stability that have come my way.
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My “vintage” 2003-era cell phone until recently. Then my wife roped me into the 2-for-1 iPhone deal at Verizon around Thanksgiving, so I can’t even claim to be a cellphone Luddite anymore. Heck, I’ve even texted for the first time with that iPhone (but can’t do it with my thumbs. Have enough trouble hitting those tiny little letters with my index finger.)
Chris in Owatonna
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Husband has a cell phone with a stylus for texting. His fingers are too big for the keys, too. What did you do with the old phone, and who would you want to have it after you pass away?
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Still have the old phone, I suppose for backup. I guess I’d bequeath it to the youngest relative I could, more for the shock value of how primitive it seems next to whatever the current generation of phones are capable of doing. They’ll really get a kick out of the telescoping antenna in the old phone. 🙂
C in O
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Chris, are you deliberately keeping us in the dark with regard to yesterday’s survey?
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i dont think chris is much of a lurker. i would guess he jumps in when hes here and has a life off the trail when hes not/
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Not sure what you mean, PJ. I commented on the blog before this but was out of town and didn’t get to it until Wed. morning.
And tim, to save space and answer you, I read most if not all of the blog posts, but only comment when I can think of something appropriate to say. Hard for my mind to get going before 9 am, and I usually read TB before 8 am.
I guess that makes me a borderline lurker, or commentator wannabe. 🙂
Chris
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Fabulous story, Renee. Of all mornings for my eyes not wanting to focus, so I’m having a hard time really seeing the photos. Hope it’s a temporary condition.
The family heirlooms in our house are almost all from husband’s family, and there are lots of them. His grandparents, and later his parents, developed the means with which to secure “valuable” old things, not so much because they appreciated their beauty, but to enhance their image of financial success. These things have come to represent the substance of what has been passed down from generation to generation based on their monetary value. When my father-in-law passed away in 2002, careful attention was paid to assure that each of the three sons got items of comparable monetary value, with little or no attention to who might have wanted a particular item for sentimental reasons.
In contrast, in my family nothing had been handed down, probably because there was nothing to hand down. In our house, dad was forever coming home from his sea voyages with “things.” Ornately carved cedar chests and rosewood tables from Thailand, leather hassocks from Morocco, and huge porcelain vases (purportedly dating from the Ming dynasty) from China, all of which (with the exception of one vase which my sister still has), quickly lost their allure to my mother. She would sell them, no doubt for less than dad had paid for them, or give them away while dad was away on his next six month stint at sea. I have two items from my childhood home, neither of any monetary value whatsoever (to be honest, I probably couldn’t give either away if I tried), but two items I treasure. One is a large, black and white oval photograph of my dad when he was three years old, the other is a ceramic decanter in the shape of a towboat pilot. The latter was a gift from one of my dad’s “brothers,” another seaman who would visit whenever he was ashore. I remember vividly the day he came and bestowed that lovely gift on my mother. For whatever reason, when it came to time to pick from my parents’ estate what I wanted to haul across the Atlantic, those were the two things that appealed to me. I left behind the hug brass samovar which my mother had rescued from a junk shop, and the mounted head of an antelope she had acquired in like fashion, my sister is stuck with those.
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I sometimes wonder if the Jade carving was kept because they thought it could be portable wealth. I wishe I would have asked my grandmother if she remembers her father bringing the carving home, and what she thought about it. I also wish I knew more about the Italian sea captain. By the way, what have you discovered in that letter from your grandmother?
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It’s 14 pages of dates, names and places. A somewhat sketchy account of their lives that nevertheless gives me a good idea of what kind of people they were. It is really too bad that my grandmother, who passed away in 1992 (same years as my father) chose to take the secret of his birth to her grave, so we never had a chance to meet her. I do relish the first-hand account of what she was like, though. Of course, I can only guess at the circumstances that led to that decision. I’m toying with the idea of writing a guest blog about it; we shall see if that ever comes to pass.
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i have my grandmothers cherry desk and i got my grandfathers hat when he died and a cool art deco cuff link box with a couple sets of links and a few tie clips in there. i had the box of family pictures to sort through but gave them to the cousin who paints because he thought the would be inspirational. i am an idiot. he had an aneurysm and his brain is there one minute not the next. i had better get them back before they get thrown out because they arent inspiring him. my grandfather’s hat led to my dads and therefore my love of hats.(being a little thin on top helps too) my family on my dds side was from the irish half of ireland and they paid attention to it. there were no heirlooms to pass on. upon my grandfathers my mom when they were dividing up the goodies asked if anyone wanted the tiffany lamp (my mom is not a conniving sort in the least) until then that old stained glass lamp over the dining room held no interest at that point it became a bigger deal than anything else in the house. i wonder where it ended up? my moms family came form the english half of ireland and had nothing to pass on from the landing in hoople north dakota but acquired lots of stuff along their way to the top of the social chain. my mom got her old car and other garbage the other sisters didnt want. i got some vintage ties. my mom discovered lots she did want got thrown out because her sister in charge though it was too much trouble to look through all that stuff. i really dislike that family. we got some leach lake property from them that came from my grandmothers indian dad. i liked him lots.i have notes of his journal like entries about his take on being the indian guy in a white mans world in northern minnesota in the mid 1900’s . i am guessing i will be the guy who passes on stuff but its all like renees figurine. lord knows where that came form but its kinda cool. do you think he won it off the italian ship captain in a card game? thats my bet. the guy owed him 100 and couldnt come up with it so he left his carving and his ring. grandfather sold the ring but the carving wouldnt bring enough to justify parting with such a cool item.
.
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That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis. He probably wouldn’t have wanted his wife to know he was gambling like that.
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I do have one thing from my father out of the junky tools he gave me. I wrote a poem once about how he gave me junky tools and have shared it on here before. It was in my novel and I did keep it when I trashed out the novel. The one thing left is a cruiser saw, which is a regular hand saw but about 2/3 the length. I hang it on the wall and use magnets to attach to it photos of Sandy over the years. And I do have the quilts my mother made and gave us. My sister had a couple of small items that have covered more than two generations and several that cover two, including a spinning wheel and her share of the quilts. My son has a cheap cast iron cat door stop that he wanted since he was a small child. Mt mother gave it to him when he was about 20.
What I have mostly inherited are diseases. I have four diseases of various levels of impact on my life that have significant genetics lengths.
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I sometimes wonder if the longevity that my family has will be a gift or a burden if I live to be as old as my parents and grandparents.
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My sister has the legacy items she has because they are distaff items (linens and crockery) and because she carried the burden of caring for our parents, especially my mother living to 90.
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yes it will be. time will tell which
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My goal was to leave a few carvings to my children and then my grandchildren, but only as requested by my son and daughter. A few years ago I carved and marked about 8 tree ornaments each for my two older grandkids. I thought that the ornaments were such small items that I was not forcing anything on them. Despite knowing they are theirs, as yet they do not really recognize them as theirs because they hang on their family tree each year. My son threw me a loop by suddenly coming up with a third grandchild. He and his wife’s style is very funky/modern/non-traditional. So I will see if I can and do carve any for him.
My older two grandkids have taken to asking things from me. They want me to do pastels of favorite pictures for them. They each now have two and want more. Waiting to see what my hands will allow from me. They say they will keep them forever. Jonah, my Harry Potter fanatic grandson, broadly hinted at having me carve a wand for him and his sister. So now I am starting the process of carving three wands. It is going all right but I have to be careful to go slow or I really mess up my upper back and shoulders. Jonah keeps calling me all concerned that he is causing me pain, which I answer with lies. Jonah even came up with his own wand design, quite nice for a third-grader. I will put them in Olivander boxes, that way my son can store Jackson’s for ten years or so and see if he even bites on Harry Potter.
I made my older grandkids beds a few years ago. Lily’s is a white picket fence design, on which over the years I have attached various low-relief carvings to match her changing interests. 3-4 years ago it was too dull for her pinkish and purplish taste, but now at 11 with lily carvings on it, she says she will take off to college with her. Jonah’s is a fire truck, which we always knew he would outgrow, but not yet.
So far my diseases are showing up in my nieces and nephews and only the depression in my own kids. But they are disorders of older age.
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Should add that the day I started carving the chess set my son announced that it was his legacy.
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nice legacy
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you are a good grandpa and there is not a damn thing you can do about passing on genetics other than hope they figure out the answer somewhere down the road.
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If you do not know, Olivander is the brand name of wands in Harry Potter. I have been joking that I could carve Ole Vander wands. I would carve them out of birch and bleach them pure white. Instead of having a phoenix feather inside, it could 1) have a piece of dried white fish inside, in which case if you shout Lutefiskorounus your enemy finds himself in a vat of lye or 2) I could put a piece of salt pork inside, in which case if you shout krubkakkium your enemy finds himself turned into a boiled potato.
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🙂
Thanks for expanding on Olivander, I was just going to look it up. Lucky grandkids you have. Reminded me that I will inherit from my mom a lovely couple of things made by her Dad, a carpenter, and my dad, who was a shop teacher for a while. End tables, lamps… These are precious.
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You are an awesome granddad. On a very oblique tangent, I met a rowan tree that had been damaged by a storm some time ago, and gathered a branch. Since then I’ve been ver-r-r-r-y slowly sanding out a wand for ritual use. I try to make it a meditation, so as soon as I start getting goal-oriented (got to smooth out that knot! Got to taper the tip some more! Got to strip down the outer bark this far down the shaft!) I stop. One my crafty ideas is to make fancy wand bags out of batiks, velvets and beaded fringes–not even Alferian Gwydion MacLir, who wrote a nice book on wandmaking and sells carved wands online, has anything other than boring white bags. I hope you post photos of the wands when (as?) they’re finished. I’d love to see what a child’s design for a wand looks like!
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Except for whatever genetic or physical characteristics I have inherited from my mother, I have absolutely nothing handed from her or her side of the family. Her father deserted the family when she was a young girl, taking only his precious accordion with him. When in her fifties, mom discovered that he had moved only 20 miles away to Dublin, where he was still living at the time. How I wish I had that accordion.
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Just a few disnes – one platter from each of my grandmothers, and an old butter dish that’s too big but plainly pretty in its way. My mom’s mom had made me a quilt when I was a kid, and I left it at my folks’ house, thinking my mom said she would mend it for me. SHE THREW IT OUT, forgetting what we’d agreed. I have memories of a couple of items I would have liked to have, and the memories will have to do – my Grandma Britson’s treadle machine, and my Grandma Sterling’s music powder box that played “Just a Song at Twilight. What I do have from her, though – a little journal she kept when I was four and stayed with her the week my sister was born. That is golden.
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I have my grandmother’s christening cup, a small china cup that was given when she was baptized. I tihas gold lettering in German.
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if you can find out what kind it was they are still available. i have an accordion friend who is an expert. the best accordion in the world is 4000 there are lots of good 400 dollars ones and the fix of an accordion is easy and cheap and not something your average joe will ever figure out. ill bet you will find it believable that i have an accordion selling .com i would guess he had an italian model that could be found in disrepair for 800 and fixed to be good as new for 200 more. if youre interested i will start the ball rolling . if you just want to start accordion i have some loaners.
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tim, it’s not that I’m really interested in owning an accordion (they’re too heavy for my back), but it’s the idea of owning the only thing my grandfather thought valuable enough to keep his entire life. I would like to own a concertina though. Do you have any of those among your treasures?
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no but i can find one. new or old?
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I don’t really need another instrument I can’t play, tim. If I happen to stumble on one, I’d probably pick it up, but it’s not something I’d go looking for, and you shouldn’t either. But I appreciate your enthusiasm.
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i think it was thanksgiving this last year when i commented to my wife that i thought we should use one of the sets of her grandmothers china. we got two sets but they were off limits and untouchable because we might break them . my moms china is up for grabs, my sisters dibsed it years ago but decided to pass now that they are old and want other stuff. i love the design it is swirly and decadent. just what you want in fancy schmancy china and she has soup tureens and creamers and salt and pepper shakers and all the side stuff. it makes dinners fun.
well any way at christmas we broke out the china form her grandma and it was delightful eating on all that intended glory. i dont think we chipped anything. i always think of leo buscaglia when i think of the china story. he had a good one that encouraged everyone to use it and not keep it tucked away for fear of chipping it. he is so right.
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I think I would feel more comfortable “dusting off” the good china instead of “breaking it out”!
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You got a point there, Renee.
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bad teeth, good health, bald head, love hate with booze, good brains, atheletic abilities, positive attitude, democratic beliefs, a sense of humor, an appreciation of music and the arts,big fingernails, handsome intelligent children, the instinct to keep trying it a different way until its done the way you want it.
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and, I’d add, remarkable candor and lack of pretense. A breath of fresh air.
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People carry romantic images of dispersing ashes, but it seldom works out that way.
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So you go on the Antiques Roadshow with your heirloom and they says it’s worth a lot. Do you sell it?
Renee, they keep saying on that show how anything Chinese, especially jade or jadite is, very valuable right now because the Chinese are buying everything back.
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Good questions. Antique Roadshow is coming to Bismarck soon. Would I sell? I have no idea. I seem to think that I wouldn’t.
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They we’re in the Twin Cities a couple of years ago. There was a lottery of some sort that you could enter if you had something you wanted them to assess. I entered but wasn’t lucky enough to be drawn. Not sure exactly I would have brought in had I been drawn, but something easy to carry for sure.
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I have a piece of wood – a curiously veined, crooked, polished branch – that was a household knickknack when I was growing up. I never asked where it came from. When my sister and I split up my mother’s things after her death, I brought it home. I showed it to Clyde since he knows about wood. He thought perhaps it was pinyon pine.
My father lived most of his life in Minnesota, but for a few years in his youth he moved to California and briefly had a place on Sunset Boulevard. The wood may have come from that region. It’s probably ben close to a hundred years since it was a part of a living tree, and who knows how long it may have existed before it fell, or was felled.
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What do I drag around from the past? Easy: every appointment calendar from the last 20 years(which contain social events as well as client appointments) and my parents’ urn. The calendars trip memories both good and bad, but the urn remains troublesome. My son, Steve, hand-fashioned this work of art out of African teak wood and poured his heart into it (so to speak). He had only four days between my mother’s death and her memorial service.
The rest of the story may be a bit graphic, though. My father had insisted that when he died and was cremated, one of us was to mix his ashes with my mother’s, “Because we’ve been intertwined for 60 years already”. This request turned out to be quite difficult as well as haunting because Steve’s urn simply could not hold the volume of my parents’ mixed ashes, leaving me with the problem of finding some way to disperse the left-overs. Imagine taking what remains of your own parents, dumping them into a plastic kitchen bag, then shaking them vigorously? All I can say is that this was very, very weird.
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What did you do with the leftovers?
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This sounds like the start of an interesting short story or maybe novel – “Leftover Parents”.
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I found someone with a boat to take me out on my parent’s beloved Crystal Bay and tossed them into the lake.
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I guess it was “bake and shake”.
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Ha!! I suppose I could’ve dumped the ashes into a cake and eaten my parents?
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This reminded me of the heavy legacy items I have, nsmely the finials from the headstones of 2 of my great-grandparents.
The tradition of the church cemetary was that the graves go in order of death, so husbands and wives were usually not buried together, let alone entire families.
Maybe 20 years ago, I noticed the finial of my great-grandmother’s stone had fallen off and was on the ground nearby. For some reason, this bothered me, so I hauled it home (then Alexandria, VA).
I’ve since moved it back to Minnesota, and a couple of years ago, I noticed the stone over my great-grandfather’s grave had completely toppled, so his finial is now in my yard as well.
Are these mine by inheritance, or have I stolen them?
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You have rescued them. They are yours as long as you want them. If anyone challenges you, tell them to talk to me.
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Or talk to Jim. we are Frisians, you know. Don’t mess with us!
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Do your people come from the same place as the large black horses I so admire?
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Yes.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPoxZ1NPBY
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I have nothing from my past. It was lost in the divorce as both parents destroyed my things. This was the sixties. My wife has some stuff from her aunt who did drawings in the thirty four fair. She is on the internet. Dorothy Dwin shows up.
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Is that sad for you or a relief?
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It gave me great pain. My family was definitely strange and I went on my own quickly. Now I am sixty eight and yet it still is a sore point with me. My father and mother independently did not like my wife and made her miserable so I cut the ties. My wife and I have been married for forty plus years and she never did anything to give them the venom that they exhibited. Three grandchildren and they never visited them. In fact they avoided them. I guess I would consider it sad, but on the other hand it is a relief because all they would have done is played mind games with my children.
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nice article!
http://www.dryguywaterproofing.com
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